Merge Rock & Indie 144 Items

In the hallowed Destroyer discography, the early trinity of City Of Daughters / Thief /
Streethawk: A Seduction holds an important place; for not only does it document Dan
Bejar's evolution from lo-fi bedroom tyro to bona fide master of the rock album, it also
contains a massive percentage of superlative Destroyer "classics." 1998's City of Daughters
features some of the first steps out of the demo-tapey experimentation of earlier recordings,
with songs like "Comments On The World As Will" refining the sound of that strippeddown
earlier work, and the seminal "No Cease Fires" offering us the first taste of just what a
full-band Destroyer might conjure.

Raucous ear candy culled from the hook-driven melodies of Slade, the glammy swagger of Marc Bolan, the morbid fantasy of Killer-era Alice Cooper & the unpredictable wit of Sparks.

Received an 8.1 rating from Pitchfork.

Waxahatchee, the solo musical project of Katie Crutchfield, is named after a creek not far from her childhood home in Alabama and seems to represent both where she came from and where she’s going. Ivy Tripp drifts confidently from its predecessors and brings forth a more informed and powerful recognition of where Crutchfield has currently found herself. The lament and grieving for her youth seem to have been replaced with control and sheer self-honesty. “My life has changed a lot in the last two years, and it’s been hard for me to process my feelings other than by writing songs,” says Crutchfield. “I think a running theme [of Ivy Tripp] is steadying yourself on shaky ground and reminding yourself that you have control in situations that seem overwhelming, or just being cognizant in moments of deep confusion or sadness, and learning to really feel emotions and to grow from that.”

Recorded and engineered by Kyle Gilbride of Wherever Audio at Crutchfield’s home on New York’s Long Island—with drums recorded in the gym of a local elementary school—Ivy Tripp presents a more developed and aged version of Waxahatchee. “The title Ivy Tripp is really just a term I made up for directionless-ness, specifically of the 20-something, 30-something, 40-something of today, lacking regard for the complaisant life path of our parents and grandparents. I have thought of it like this: [Waxahatchee’s last album] Cerulean Salt is a solid and Ivy Tripp is a gas.”

Will Butler has been a member of the band Arcade Fire for over 10 years. This is his first release under his own name.

Policy is American music—in the tradition of the Violent Femmes, The Breeders, The Modern Lovers, Bob Dylan, Smokey Robinson, The Magnetic Fields, Ghostface Killah. And John Lennon (I know, but it counts). Music where the holy fool runs afoul of the casual world.

Policy was recorded in one week in Jimi Hendrix’s old living room (upstairs at Electric Lady Studios). Jeremy Gara played drums; other musicians contributed woodwinds and backing vocals. Most everything else was played by Will.

1st time pressed to vinyl. Originally released in 2010, this picks up on the introspective, world-weary quality of Man-Made but also delivers a bit of the classic bright pop the band is known for.

1st time pressed to vinyl. Originally released in 2005, this is a classic Fanclub record in tone & arrangement, & handsomely demonstrates the "less is more" maxim -- it is both airier & more light of touch than it's immediate predecessors.

Shattered will be Reigning Sound's first album for Merge and the first full LP by the group since 2009's Love and Curses. The band?s principal songwriter/member is Greg Cartwright, who's been leading the shifting cast of characters since 2001. The album was recorded at Daptone's Brooklyn studio (where drummer Mikey works in the office) and masterfully engineered by Wayne Douglas. The recordings are warm and punchy, a mixed bag of rockers, ballads, and something in between. There are only 11 songs on the album, but the band reckons it's just right.

180gm LP+CD set features not only the album in its original European tracklisting but also a revelatory set of covers, rehearsals & B-sides
that reveal the earliest iterations of the group. And there's the previously unreleased "Sarah's Prelude," too, the lovely, lonely & abandoned opener of an album that stuns, even without the strings.

Incredible new LP by Caribou. Similar to Four Tet, this one is more pulsating and dancefloor-oriented than his previous work, while keeping the experimental folksy edge we all love. Looooovely!

180 gram incl. free digital download!

Jade Hairpins waste no time fulfilling their second album's titular demand. From itsharmony-drenched opening note to its baroque-anthemic conclusion, Get Me the GoodStuff is positively loaded with musical ideas, an absurdist buffet of sound andaesthetic that comes with one hell of a floorshow as the Hairpins stack thoseideas higher and higher, almost daring them to crash to the floor. Instead, thoseelements_punksploitation, power pop, baggy, funk, and Italo disco are just sometouchstones_are not only held aloft, they defy gravity and convention.These pyrotechnics are, in true Jade Hairpins fashion, something of a sleight ofhand. While the music swaggers and gallops, Get Me the Good Stuff grapples withanxiety and self-doubt, obfuscating pain and alienation with sparkling wit and somestraight-up ravers. Get Me the Good Stuff opens with one of those, "Let It Be Me," inwhich Jonah Falco shouts lyrics about being alone with one's shortcomings againstguitars, synths, and harmonized vocals that are on the verge of closing in. The songis just over 90 seconds long, hitting with the gnarled-barb ferocity of punk and thegleeful insanity of theatrical art rock.It is, in other words, overwhelming. Or it would be if Jade Hairpins_Jonah Falcoand Mike Haliechuk_weren't remarkably nimble in their ability to bring unity tosounds by placing them in competition against each other. When those sounds areadjacent, like the glam and disco that saturate "Drifting Superstition," the thrill ofthose universes colliding in the heat of an absolutely filthy clavichord line turns itslyrics, about the habit of solving personal problems by ignoring them, into a winner'santhem on the order of Bowie or Hot Chocolate.Get Me the Good Stuff arcs towards unequivocal joy as Falco, Jade Hairpins' primarylyricist, breaks these cycles and attempts to run away with his dreams. The arc isroughly analogous to how the album came to fruition. Four years removed fromHarmony Avenue, an album of material that pr...

In 2014, Wye Oak released Shriek, their fourth album. It was a necessary departure for Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack, who found themselves on uncertain ground after two years of constant touring for 2011's Civilian, living on opposite ends of the country and trying to revitalize their creative partnership. Wasner set aside her guitar for a bass. Stack took on the band's upper register, playing syncopated, meditative keyboard parts that interacted with Wasner's voice, which was newly freed from its call-and-response relationship to the guitar - what had been, until then, a signature of Wye Oak's sound. "This idea and the ensuing creative reworking of our band did what it was meant to do," Wasner writes in 2024. "It ended a long, painful period of creative stagnancy and reconnected me with the joy of making music." During that period, Wasner and Stack were introduced to William Brittelle, the Brooklyn-based composer whose 2019 LP Spiritual America featured Wye Oak, the Metropolis Ensemble, and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus. His orchestral reimaginings of five songs from Shriek (Shriek: Variations, if you will) are the centerpiece of this package, which serves not only to mark the tenth anniversary of a great album, but to demonstrate the richness of Wye Oak's compositions. Stack says of Shriek: Variations: "It's like looking at the songs in a funhouse mirror. The songs on Shriek can be stripped down or embellished - this is maximal embellishment. William took the album and blew it to smithereens, looking at it in a weird, prismatic way." Through Brittelle, Wasner and Stack found themselves at the intersection of classical, experimental, and pop music. Further collaborations, like the Brooklyn Youth Chorus- featuring No Horizon and Paul and Michi Wiancko's string arrangements on "My Signal" from The Louder I Call, The Faster It Runs, followed, as this connection fundamentally changed the way Wye Oak approached making records, incorporating an entirely new palette of sound into their work. That shift began here. Shriek: Variations may feel like a startling take on the material, something like light bursting into a room through drawn curtains, but Brittelle's arrangements are largely original to his first collaborations with Wye Oak a decade ago, suggesting that his maximalist arrangements have lived comfortably within the framework of Shriek the whole time, waiting for the right moment to emerge. It's a fitting reintroduction to the album, which upon its initial release was pigeonholed into the easy one-note talking point of being the "no-guitar" record. But even so, as that happened, Shriek quietly started to become a staple among Wye Oak's core fans. Here, with help from Brittelle's expansive compositions, the release draws attention back to the songwriting - how, regardless of the instrumentation, Wasner and Stack's uncanny musicwriting partnership at the core is what makes both Shriek and Wye Oak excellent. Joined by the Metropolis Ensemble, Paul Wiancko, and Lizzie Burns, Wye Oak turn songs like "Logic of Color" inside out, reaching towards a kind of pastoral bombast, Brittelle's aesthetic with Wasner and Stack as an anchor. In fact, "Logic of Color" in this iteration takes that "no-guitar" script and flips it, with Wasner playing the synthesizer ostinato on acoustic guitar at its center. If Shriek is a record that charts the depths of solemnity and inner space, its Variations, roiling in a sea of winds, brass, and strings, recolors that space and complicates it, a gorgeous, unexpected response to the original's siren call.

Limited edition silver vinyl anniversary reissue of the Magnetic Fields' classic 1999 rumination on, of course, love. Funny, smart, dark, memorable, and a lifetime's worth of listening. Stephin Merritt solidifies his songwriting genius on his "most ambitious and fully realized work". (amg) This vinyl reissue is remastered for vinyl and beautifully packaged in a 10" slipcase box with three double gatefold sleeves and a 24 page booklet!

Transistor Radio:the fourth M. Ward album. Listening to M. Ward's breezy ode toradio's forgotten heydays is a lot like taking in a huge breath of dust-bowl wind --however, its charms are rooted in the hazy lemonade-sipping of summer rather thanthe great depression-obsession of the post-O Brother, Where Art Thou? mainstream.

Post-War: the fifth M. Ward album. Its songs unravel their world-wearied tales of life, love, and human kindness with an innate and special grace, helped in part by the very talented friends who join him on this record, such as Neko Case and Mike Mogis, as well as old Monsters of Folk touring buddy Jim James (My Morning Jacket).

Duet for Guitars #2 introduced us to M. Ward's characteristic rasp andfingerpicking prowess. More minimal in scope than future records, the songsrun the gamut from lullabies to rocking declarations of love. Released onCo-Dependent Records in 1999, one of the initial 1,000 copies found its wayto Howe Gelb, who re-released it in 2000 on Ow Om. It went out of print andremained a hard-to-find piece of the M. Ward catalog until 2007, when it wasreissued on Merge with three new tracks. More than an origin story, Duet forGuitars #2 is a beautiful, assured album that is sure to make lo-fi andAmericana aficionados swoon, to say nothing of M. Ward fans new and old.

In 2003, everything broke open for Ward with the release of Transfiguration of Vincent. Critically lauded and long beloved, Pitchfork hailed it as an album that “broadcasts timelessness and defies genre constraints,” and Slant placed it on their list of the best albums of the 2000s. On Transfiguration of Vincent, Ward’s elegant fingerpicking, evocative croon, and heartrending lyricism came into full bloom, casting a spell so powerful that even a song as universal as David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” felt not only new but irrevocably his. One of the most cherished albums in the Merge catalog, Transfiguration of Vin- cent is both a great place to begin your love affair with M. Ward and a deep, stunningly realized work that listeners have returned to over and over again for 20 years.

What I can say about Torres is I think the music comes from a convicted place. Not convicted meaning a person is narrowly and foolishly committed to an ideal, or unshakably convinced of themselves, or a zealot, or stubborn. I mean dedicated, I mean: If Torres' music gets weird, gets brainy, gets funny, gets defiant, provokes, deliberately scandalizes, employs the crass to undermine the austere, courts lofty philosophical truth-it's all done with the conviction of an artist with the (essential) belief in the worth of their task. I think you can hear it in the songs, someone reaching, leaning over the boundary between known and not, probing the almighty. After a decade and six studio albums and however many one-offs and tours and articles read and conversations had, the parts of this pursuit I've been able to observe are all marked by a dedication to creation that treats the act-ongoing-with as much preciousness as the evidence of the act that is left in a record. The modes of being are different: heartbroken, broke, furious (right- and unrighteously), awestruck by love, compelled by desire. sometimes resigned to death, sometimes fascinated by and reverent of the future. Sometimes viscerally present, other times suspended in heady awareness, poised on a fulcrum of observation and participation in the phenomenon that aliveness is. The tools are the same: instruments that growl and shriek and moan, a lyrical voice shouting, swooning, chuckling, snarling as the moment commands. Torres' music-making is conducted in a melodic vocabulary unique to itself-methods, equipment, circumstances shifting around the impulse to affirm the self within the world, to make art that bears all these little artifacts of the divine and of the real and show it to people and know it is valuable. I think that's what Mackenzie's music does. And I think it's just incredibly good music to listen to. -Julien Baker Torres is the pseudonym of Mackenzie Scott. She was born January 23, 1991, and lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her wife Jenna, stepson Silas, and puppy Sylvia. She has been releasing albums and performing as Torres since 2013. What an enormous room is Torres' sixth studio album (her third with Merge). It was recorded in September and October 2022 at Stadium Heights Sound in Durham, North Carolina. It was engineered by Ryan Pickett, produced by Mackenzie Scott and Sarah Jaffe, mixed by TJ Allen in Bristol, UK, and mastered by Heba Kadry in NYC. The album contains 10 songs. Mackenzie wrote all of them. Sarah played bass guitar, synths, drums, organ, and piano. Mackenzie sang vocals, played guitar, bass, synths, organ, piano, and programmed drums. Additional synth bass, tambourine, and shakers were played by TJ Allen.